


can't start a fire (without a spark)

by shinigamiroulette



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, I can't believe I've done this, Resident Evil 6, Sex Pollen, Smut, in which Sherry passes out a lot, porn with a whole lotta plot, this was supposed to be like 2k words idk what happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-29 06:30:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17802797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinigamiroulette/pseuds/shinigamiroulette
Summary: The Ustanak separates Sherry and Leon from their partners in Lanshiang. They run into an escaped Neo-Umbrella reject, and Sherry's day goes from bad to worse.And then maybe a little bit better.





	can't start a fire (without a spark)

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this as a Jake/Piers oneshot set on the oil rig and somehow it turned into this???
> 
> also I headcanon that Leon’s crazy superhuman abilities come from the remnants of his plaga infection because @ Capcom you can’t make me watch shit like Vendetta and expect me to believe this is a human man
> 
> Title from Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark.

Sherry sees it in the lab, rifling through scattered papers for anything useful as Jake stands guard impatiently by the door. She knows they’ve been gone too long, knows that six months as prisoners of war will mean obligatory distrust from allies bitten one too many times by experience. She thinks that maybe, if she comes bearing gifts of secrets and monsters, it might make the whole transition a little easier.

Something catches her eye, an experiment file much like the other three she’s already holding. It’s topped with a grainy photo of something lumpy and misshapen, and branded with a stark red stamp of FAILURE. Nothing interesting, then.

 _2013/06/29. B.O.W. Breeding Initializer_ -

Okay, maybe interesting. Implications horrifying, but still interesting.

She adds it to her pile and dives back in, much to Jake’s annoyance. Worrying about monster sex is somebody else’s job, right now. She doesn’t think about it again.

 

* * *

 

Hours later, they’re surrounded by the burning wreckage of a passenger jet ( _she should have known it was Leon right then, really_ ) and there’s a roaring B.O.W. bearing down on their asses.

She rolls to the side, dinky handgun up and firing even though she knows it has about as much effect on this behemoth as a mosquito bite. Probably less. Her hands are shaking, and she’s not sure whether it’s from the exhaustion of months as a lab rat, the disbelief of seeing her childhood savior again after fifteen years, or the dawning horror at what she may have been doing all this time, what she almost did. Probably all of it.

This fight against the ugly beast is the hardest yet – not only does she have to watch out for herself and an entirely-too-reckless mercenary, but her eyes drift almost against her will to where he stands, chin up and back straight as he fires as though he can actually hurt this thing. She knows it’s been fifteen years that he’s been serving on his own, fifteen years that he’s survived countless encounters surely just as dangerous as this one.

That knowledge doesn’t loosen the knot her lungs seem to have tied themselves into.

Then, just as soon as it arrived, their stalker disappears. Sherry’s been through too much to think it’s really gone, but she’ll take the momentary reprieve as her legs shake with the strain of the chase.

“Take it from us, this guy’s indestructible.” Jake says, leaping off a shipping crate and landing in a crouch beside her, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Leon and his partner both nod shortly, the picture of professionalism.

“Over there,” the woman says, pointing to a sheet-metal fence on the other side of the loading dock. “We can clear that pretty easy.”

Even Jake is silent as they dash across the concrete, guns raised, still cautious. At least Sherry’s managed to train him in some aspects – she doesn’t even have to ask before he’s sliding in front of her, back to the fence and fingers laced together in front of him. Hardly slowing to stow her pistol, she places her foot in his hand and uses her momentum to propel herself upward. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Leon leaping for the top on his own. She has no time to be impressed by his abilities as they both find precarious footing and start to reach down to their partners.

Which is, of course, when everything goes back to hell.

With a thunderous roar the monster comes flying out of the sky, aiming a very large gun straight at their exposed faces. The thought of throwing herself out of the way barely has time to cross Sherry’s mind before she feels hands around her waist and the world explodes.

 

* * *

 

Sherry comes around to darkness and the ache of her ears ringing like a church bell. Everything hurts, the exposed skin of her face and hands raw and tingling as though she’d been sunburnt. What the hell had those wannabe researchers done to her this time? Set her on fire just to see what would happen? She wouldn’t put it past them.

But it _wasn’t_ them, because she’d just spent the last couple hours running from them and their _actual tank_. It _wasn’t_ them, because she’d just been blown to hell by their guard dog.

 _Shit_.

Sherry’s eyes shoot open to jack-o-lantern flames licking at the smoggy night sky, and immediately everything lurches sickeningly. She groans, squeezing her eyes shut again as the concrete rolls beneath her like an angry sea.

“Sherry? Sherry, can you hear me?”

She knows that voice, sharp and quick and a little bit panicked.

“Sherry? Come on, talk to me.”

Even though she feels like she might spit up the contents of her stomach along with the words, she forces herself to answer. “…Leon? Wha…”

“Yeah. Yeah, there you go.” There’s still a sheen of that experienced composure over his words, but she can hear the relief underneath. “That asshole blew us up, then bolted. My comm’s out, but Helena’s got Jake and she knows what she’s doing. Can you sit up?”

She makes herself nod. She still feels like crap, but at least the planet seems to be finding its way back onto its axis. Keeping her eyes shut, she fights gravity for a moment to haul her body upwards, and cracks them open again slowly when the nausea settles.

She feels a little shock at how close another face is to hers. Leon kneels barely a foot away, in front of a mountain of fiery rubble that looks like it used to be about half of the shipping yard. He looks about as good as she feels. His clothes are ripped and smeared with fresh dirt and blood that cakes in his hair and over his skin. He’s got a standard-issue first-aid kit open on the ground in front of him, and seems to have been in the middle of wrapping a bandage around his wrist when she woke up. He’s staring at her very intently, and it takes her a moment to realize that he’s examining her eyes for signs of concussion. She knows he finds none, because she’s already beginning to feel like a whole person again, and he sits back on his haunches in satisfaction.

“You okay?” He asks, “Had me worried for a second there.”

She opens her mouth to reassure him that she can feel her body knitting itself back together as they speak, before the memory of a rushed embrace comes back to her and she blurts out something else entirely.

“What the hell were you _thinking_ , Leon? You could have been killed!”

He stops wrapping his bandage again to stare at her incredulously, but she plows onward anyways.

“ _I’m_ the one with the healing factor here, you know that! You don’t need to break my fall, I can’t fix _your_ fractured spine!” She snaps, feeling more livid with every word.

She surrounded herself with hero-types when she went into this line of work, she knows that. Deep, _deep_ down, even Jake seems to have some self-sacrificing qualities. Maybe just because he has to keep her alive to get his paycheck, but she knows well enough what the curve of his back looks like when he steps between her and the enemy.

The difference is, _Jake_ is Albert Wesker’s son. _Jake_ is almost as indestructible as she is, if not nearly as gifted in bouncing back. _Jake_ is not a man who’s been her hero since she was twelve years old, a man who she would never, ever forgive herself for getting killed.

 _Jake_ isn’t _Leon_.

“Maybe,” Leon acknowledges, “But _you’re_ the one he was shooting at, not me. Got you pretty good, too. I was afraid your body wouldn’t be able to heal itself as is.”

She knows without asking that Leon understands her aversion to being a damsel in distress and that the thought of that had never crossed his mind. She feels her anger ebb, and her shoulders slump. She doesn’t apologize, won’t apologize for worrying about him the way he obviously had about her, but she knows he understands that too.

“Are you okay, then? I have some more medical supplies in my bag, just got out of a pretty high-tech lab-“ She looks around for it and swears loudly when she doesn’t see it anywhere.

Leon barks out a surprised laugh and his eyes twinkle mischievously when he says, “Language.”

She glares at him.

“Must’ve been thrown clear or torn apart when we got blasted.” He shrugs the shoulder of his uninjured arm and grins wryly. “But don’t worry about me. I may not be as…gifted as you are, but I’ve picked up some tricks over the years. I’m a bit more durable than I was.”

She raises her eyebrows at him, but accepts the answer. “You’ll have to tell me about it later. About a lot of things.”

He nods, standing and offering her his uninjured hand. They need to get moving – the B.O.W. may be gone for now, but Sherry knows it’s only a matter of time. She watches Leon pack up the medical kit, bandage glowing stark white against the grime on his skin, and starts off through the maze of crates as soon as he looks ready. She’s grateful that the thing at least had the courtesy to shoot her after her gun had been secured in its holster, so she hadn’t lost everything.

Any documents that may have given her credence with the feds were gone, of course, but she’d cross that bridge when she got to it. Maybe even burn it, if Leon was right about everything.

She didn’t really doubt that he was.

“Sticking to the plan?” She throws over her shoulder, drawing her gun as she speaks.

Leon comes up beside her, one of several weapons already in hand. There was something to be said for strapping oneself up like a human arsenal.

“That’s our best bet. Helena isn’t stupid enough to barge in on Simmons without us, so they should meet us near your rendezvous.”

Sherry notices that his confidence doesn’t stretch to Jake, and has to suppress a smirk. She thinks Leon sees it anyways.

 

* * *

 

They duck behind their third dumpster of the day, breathing quick and quiet as a horde of J’avo tromp past. Sherry huddles close to Leon, wrinkling her nose in distaste as she contorts herself into a strange sort of wall-sit in an attempt to avoid contact with the questionably brown puddle underneath her. Leon looks very smug from his crouch on a perfectly dry patch of pavement.

“I have hid in so many dumpsters since this mess started, it’s not even funny. I almost prefer the B.O.W.s.” She mutters when they’re sure they’re in the clear.

Leon laughs at her and they slide back out into the alleyway, his face immediately going serious again as he raises his gun to its usual position. Sherry marvels at his ability to put on and take off masks the way he does – in the hour or so that they’ve been wandering through the city, he’s been switching back and forth between the earnest rookie cop that she’d known and the businesslike secret agent he seems to have become at breakneck speed. She’s not sure which Leon is authentic, if either of them are. She does notice, however, that his sense of humor is now tempered with a generous dash of cynicism, and she thinks that’s genuine.

Finding their way to Sherry’s rendezvous point has proven more difficult than they’d anticipated. The explosion had quite emphatically blocked off several avenues of travel from their starting position, and the streets they found themselves on now seemed to wind every which way except the one they needed to go. The only upside was that they also seemed to be relatively uninhabited – patrolling groups of J’avo passed by every now and then, but they’d only encountered a few zombies so far, and no more advanced B.O.W.s.

The two of them continue down the street, Leon taking point with Sherry watching their backs. She takes the opportunity to watch his back in a different way, as well – to compare the way he moved, the way he spoke, the way his eyes glittered when he got a good shot off, to the childhood hero she had long since realized was just a terrified kid.

He held the gun looser now, easier, like it was a flesh-and-blood extension of his body instead of a viper that could sink its teeth into his hand at any moment. He was taller, shoulders broader, body bound in lithe muscle that could only have come from years of fighting experience. And he showed her some of that, as well. He seemed to elect not to use the gun at times for the hell of it – much like Jake, he had a talent for physical combat. She watched him grab and throw and kick and punch and stab, and she felt impressed and a little lost around this man she both adored and could hardly recognize.

But then he would turn to her, tilt his head the way he always had when he spoke, and she was a little girl again who fell into line behind him.

Sherry’s trying not to dwell on it, she is, but the feeling is disorienting. It’s like meeting a stranger and coming home all at once.

Then, the front of a building explodes, and she doesn’t have time to dwell anymore.

Leon throws out an arm to stop her - rather unnecessarily, she thinks - as a loud screech sounds from within the wreckage.

“ _Shit_.” Leon hisses immediately, face darker than she has ever seen it, “We need to get out of here, _now_!”

They don’t even have a chance to move, though, before the thing is upon them. It bursts out of the destruction with a victorious howl, ugly like cottage cheese, and Sherry has a sudden flashback to a grainy photo in a failed experiment file.

They bolt down a side alley, another scream trailing after them before Sherry hears the inevitable thudding footfalls of a chase. Leon’s running faster than she’s ever seen him, and one risky glance sideways tells her he’s well and truly freaked out. He’s met this thing before, then. She doesn’t know why Neo-Umbrella considered it a failure, and she doesn’t really want to find out.

But of course, she will, because it’s a dead end. Typical.

Leon’s spitting expletives like a hissing cat, his agent’s eyes scanning their surroundings for anything they can use to get out of here before the monster at the mouth of the alley makes it the last hundred feet. He grabs Sherry by the arm and yanks her backwards – there’s another dumpster, naturally, and Sherry follows as he pulls himself up onto it and begins to climb the fence separating them from the street behind. It’s topped with razor wire, but lacerated is better than dead, and Sherry will be fine. She hopes Leon has the same confidence and isn’t just being colossally stubborn. The latter option is probably more likely.

She should have been worrying more about herself though, it seems. Leon makes it to the top of the fence no problem, forcing himself through its defenses with a curse, and lands a bit less gracefully than usual on the other side. At the same moment, Sherry reaches the top, slicing her palm open on the wire with a pain she hardly feels, and a slimy hand grabs her ankle and _yanks_.

She can’t help the shout that’s torn from her lips as sharp metal bites deep into her flailing arm before she crashes back down onto the lid of the dumpster.

“ _Sherry_!” Leon shouts, but she can hardly hear him, because that thing is _right there_.

It’s even uglier up close, hulking and slimy, a mouth full of razor sharp teeth the only part of its body that doesn’t bulge with pulsating sacs. It stinks, too – it leans closer, making a pleased chittering noise as it examines its prey, and she almost spews on herself right then and there.

“Sherry, _get away from that thing_! It’s infectious!”

Leon’s words break through her moment of disgusted reverie, and she scrambles to her feet. Immune to the G-virus she may be, this was no G-virus. She backs into the fence, looking around desperately for any sort of escape route, any way around this thing because she doesn’t have enough time to climb the fence that’s shaking from the way Leon must be trying to get back over it-

The monster grabs her. Sherry yanks her pistol back out of its holster, raises it, and fires it directly into that ugly face.

She hits it right in the mouth, and it screams.

She realizes that Leon’s yelling too, but she can’t distinguish the words, because she’s just been hit full in the face by something that feels like tear gas mixed with rotten sewage. It’s the most foul stench she’s ever experienced, and it blinds her, deafens her, crawls up her nose and down her throat until she wants to rip her tongue out just so she can stop tasting it. It seems to settle in her gut, heavy and hot, curling up like a cat with every intent to get comfortable.

Then she feels pain explode across her back like a firework. After a long moment, it dulls to a throb, and the fog that’s been shrouding her senses – was it real or just in her head? – begins to dissipate.

And she hears Leon.

“Sherry! _Sherry_!” If he’d sounded worried the last time she’d been knocked out, he sounded positively terrified now. “No, goddammit, fuck, no-“

Her body’s already handled whatever it was that physically hurt her, and though that strange heat still pulses in her torso, the feeling of drowning in weeks-old feces has faded away. She cracks her eyes open to see no monster, no gas, just a streetlight above her and Leon standing bloody and pale, staring at her in abject horror.

“Leon?” She asks for the second time in as many hours, sitting up suddenly, “What happened?”

He doesn’t answer, though the expression on his face is different now. Unreadable. Sherry looks down and sees the corpse of the shrieking monster on the pavement behind him.

“Leon?” Sherry tries again, “Leon, look, I’m fine. I told you, I can heal. I’m fine.”

Leon’s posture loosens, some of the tension in his expression dropping as he eyes her for a long moment before seeming to sag in relief.

“Okay.” He says, almost laughing, “I have no idea how, but okay. Okay. You’re okay.”

Sherry crosses her arms tightly over her chest, feeling as though she’s missing something very important. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Leon looks incredulous. “Are you kidding me? That thing spreads the virus through gas, Sherry. And you just got a face full of it.”

Sherry blinks. Blinks again. Looks at the dead B.O.W., looks at Leon. She’s immune to the G-virus, but this is no G-virus. According to everything they know, she should be a slavering zombie by now.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, she supposes?

“…maybe G-virus immunity has farther-reaching implications than we thought?” She shrugs. “I don’t know. But I feel fine. Kinda weird-“, the heat pulsates, but it’s comfortable, not painful, “-but fine.”

“If you were gonna turn, you should have by now.” Leon says slowly. “I don’t know how, but I think you’re okay.”

He pushes himself off the wall, wincing, and Sherry realizes for the first time just how much new blood is on his clothing. It’s nearly in tatters, gashes all along his arms and legs, and he’s covered in enough of the red stuff to be setting kids on fire at prom.

“Are _you_ okay?” She gasps, rushing to his side and examining a particularly nasty-looking cut on his exposed forearm.

The corners of Leon’s lips turn up ruefully. “Yeah. I uh…didn’t have the easiest time getting back over here.”

Sherry turns to eye the curls of razor wire that sit innocently atop the fence, dripping dark wetness down onto the concrete. She sighs. “Still have your first-aid kit?”

Leon pulls the small box out of his pocket as Sherry guides him to sit down against the wall. She opens it to find that there’s not much left inside, and picks through the bandages, needles, and spool of thread.

“Anything need stitching?” She eyes him carefully, not sure if she trusts him to tell her the truth.

He definitely notices, and gives her his most innocent eyes. “Nope. I know it looks bad, but they’re mostly superficial. Should heal within an hour or so.”

Sherry stops her examination and raises both eyebrows at him. They both know that isn’t a normal human rate of healing, and he gives her the same wry grin from before.

“I picked up a bit of a…bug in Spain once.” He snickers to himself for reasons she doesn’t understand. “I managed to cure myself before I turned, but it had the good grace to leave me a parting gift. Not nearly as useful as yours, but I get by.”

Sherry blows out air and sits back on her haunches. That was _not_ what she’d been expecting, but now that she thinks about it, she really shouldn’t have been surprised. She knows what sort of lives they lead, and with Leon’s skills she doesn’t doubt he’s seen a lot of hell on Earth since Raccoon City. It really would have been stranger if he _hadn’t_ come out of all that with some sort of contamination.

So…he was just like her. Well, close enough, anyways.

“Does the government know?” She asks.

Leon gives her a deeply unimpressed look. “What do you think?”

Sherry actually laughs as she snaps the top back on the first aid kit, suddenly feeling a whole lot closer to this new Leon than she had before.

Then she remembers what exactly they’re sitting next to, and sobers a bit.

“You said that thing is what caused all this?” She jerks her chin to it in a fairly unnecessary motion.

Leon’s face falls back into darkness. “Yeah. Well, not _this_ , not exactly, but…” He trails off, and Sherry waits for him to find the words.

“The president’s dead.”

Okay. Not that she had any idea what he was going to say, but if she had, that would not have been on the table.

“What?” She realizes she’s gaping at him and can hardly find it in her to shut her mouth.

“I shot him.”

“ _What?_ ”

As Leon launches into his tale of the horrors of Tall Oaks, Sherry feels her fists tighten in the dirtied fabric of her shirt. The president was dead. The president was dead, and Leon had had to shoot him, and Sherry had been powerless 8,000 miles away. People had died and died and died, and were still dying. And Sherry had been _helping_ the man who had done all this.

“-and so they extracted the gas, somehow, and used it to bomb the city.”

Sherry doesn’t care about the gas anymore. God, so many people had _died_.

“Sherry?”

She feels a warm hand on hers, and realizes she’s shaking. She bites down on her lower lip, hard, and says “I’m so stupid.”

Leon’s eyes go soft and he shakes his head quickly. “No. Don’t do this, Sherry.”

She pulls her hand away. “I should have realized. I was just so excited to get out of that cell, to _do_ something where no one was poking or prodding me and maybe I could start to try and make up for what my father did that I-“

“You don’t need to make up for what your father did, Sherry.” Leon interrupts, like she knew he would. Like she would have, if Jake had said the same thing. “That was _not your fault_.”

“Maybe.” She shakes her head helplessly, “But this-”

“Also wasn’t your fault.”

Sherry grits her teeth. “I helped him, Leon! I’ve been running missions for him for ages, collecting samples and delivering research and making connections, and then he does _this_? _I_ made that possible! If I hadn’t been so _blind_ I could have…”

“Could have what?” Leon says when she doesn’t continue, “Could have saved all these people?”

She nods. Her throat feels tight, but the last thing she wants to do is cry in front of him.

“You couldn’t have.” Her mouth opens to retort, to tell him they both know that’s impossible to say, but he knows she will and so he plows forward, “The missions you went on probably contributed to his plans, sure. But if it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else. This had nothing to do with you, Sherry. You were _not the reason_.”

His voice is quiet but fierce, his eyes hard and intense. Sherry feels like he’s had this conversation before.

“I told you what Adam had been planning. That was why Simmons did what he did. That was the _only_ reason, and the fact that you were one of hundreds of agents whose information he used to pull this off does not make you guilty.” He sighs softly, resigned. “These people…they would have died no matter what.”

She nods slowly. She doesn’t really believe him, and he knows that. Guilt, whether deserved or not, is a constant companion in their line of work, and all anyone can do is try to soften the blow.

She thinks he’s done that, at least.

Sherry’s hands go back to her lap, twist together, and that’s when she realizes that something’s changed. The warm purring of the cat in her belly has moved to the back of her right hand, pulsating with heat as though someone had just slapped her there. It feels almost as though the comfort of Leon’s palm on her skin is still there, though his hand remains on his knee where he’d left it after she’d rejected his touch.

This remnant of her near-undeath experience brings her attention back to the dead monster beside them, and that’s when she remembers where she knows it from. She stands, moves to lean over the body and examine it more closely.

“You said this thing can infect anyone around it without even touching them?”

The scraping sound of Leon standing up behind her is followed by “Yeah. Most efficient killing machine they’ve made yet.”

The derisive snort that follows tells Sherry what he thinks of that.

She frowns down at the sprawled remains. “And you said you met one of these yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

Absentmindedly, Sherry rubs the back of her right hand with the fingers of her left. Perhaps she’s imagining things, but the skin feels warmer than before. “That…hmm.”

Leon comes up beside her, cocks an eyebrow at her. “What is it?”

Sherry sighs and shakes her head. “It’s probably nothing, just…when Jake and I were leaving the research facility they were holding us at-”, Leon’s other eyebrow follows, and she remembers she hadn’t exactly caught him up on her vacation, “-later - I grabbed some experiment reports in case there was anything useful. There was one for one of these from yesterday that was marked a failure. Called it a ‘breeding initializer’, which I don’t think is…whatever you met.”

“Breeding? Oh, that sounds just great.” Leon’s tone of complete and utter exasperation pulls an unwilling smile from Sherry.

“I didn’t get to see much more, the file was in my bag.” She finishes apologetically.

“Well…” Leon seems to be considering it for a moment, then shakes his head and shrugs. “Let’s hope we don’t have to find out and we’ll worry about it later, yeah? We’ve got a meeting to get to.”

Sherry nods shortly and follows him out of the alleyway, leaving the ugly thing alone to rot.

 

* * *

 

It takes about another hour of wandering the winding streets, Leon’s cuts now faded pink against his skin, before Sherry realizes that something is wrong.

The hot feeling in her stomach returned a few minutes after they started walking, rising and falling from scorching crescendos into valleys of warm-bath comfort. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but she couldn’t say it was enjoyable. It felt a bit like sitting too close to a fire – cozy for a while, until overexposure begins to scald. She wonders if inhaling that gas irritated her insides somehow.

The back of her hand, where Leon touched her, throbs with the same heat. Sherry doesn’t have an explanation for that one.

But now, street after street after street later, taken in silence with no further B.O.W. encounters of any kind, she’s aware that it’s spreading.

Where previously it had been confined to a single spot, sitting like a white-hot bullet in her gut, the sensation seems to be diffusing. Her whole torso feels warm, feels fuzzy, the pleasant laziness of a summer’s day involuntarily relaxing tense muscles. Her grip on her gun is faltering, the placement of each footstep less sure than the last.

Something is very wrong.

Something is very wrong, and it’s because of that _thing_ , because there’s nothing else that it could be. Leon had said she was okay, because in all his experience, the infected turned in the first few seconds after exposure. If Sherry was still Sherry by the time she’d sat up and wondered why he was looking at her like that, she wasn’t going to…he thought. Granted, neither of them had ever seen anyone with the G-virus get cross-infected before, so who really knew how the virus was going to react?

“Leon?” Sherry says, uncertainly, a little too loud.

Leon glances back over his shoulder, seems to see something in her eyes that makes him come to a full stop and turn around.

“Sherry?” He responds, a pucker between his brows. “You okay?”

“I…” She trails off.

She knows what she wants to say. _Hey Leon, I feel super weird and I’m pretty sure that virus isn’t as gone as we think it is!_

She wants to say _Hey Leon, can you point your gun this way, please?_

She wants to say _Hey Leon, I don’t know what’s happening and I’m scared but don’t you dare let me hurt you._

She can’t get any of the words out. Sherry feels as if her throat is closing up, as if something’s sitting in her chest and squeezing her lungs together when she tries to tell him that maybe the virus was just biding its time to turn her into the last thing she’s ever wanted to be.

As though the virus hears her thoughts, as though it feels her mounting terror, the feeling begins to spread in earnest.

Tendrils of warmth reach outwards in all directions from the original point of contact, worming their way through her veins. They curl around her ribs, dance down her arms, caress the backs of her ears. They slip behind her breasts, they slide down between her thighs.

It doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming anymore. It feels soft, soothing, like slipping into a warm tub after a long, hard day. It’s in her head, too, and everything is starting to feel a little fuzzy. A little nice. She feels tipsy and happy and like maybe this whole situation isn’t so bad, if she feels this pleasant and Leon’s hair keeps catching the light like that.

Her hand is the good warm too, now. Really good, actually. The kind of good that’s reaching directly for the finger of heat that’s slid between her legs and giving it a tug.

Sherry shakes her head, hard, tries to snap out of it. She knows what’s happening. She _knows_ , even as the virus tries to double down.

Granted, she didn’t know of any virus that made people feel like they’d just had a few glasses of wine in a bath and desperately needed to get off, but she didn’t really have the time or the capacity to think about that right now.

“Sherry? Are you alright?” Leon, cautious but still so trusting. Trusting his own experience. Trusting Sherry.

Coming closer.

“Leon, I…” She holds out a hand to stop him, “I think…I need to sit down. I think…I don’t know what’s happening.”

He looks like he wants to say something else, but closes his mouth and nods shortly instead, his hair bouncing in a motion she can’t help but follow. Before she can block him again, he closes the distance and grabs her arm.

Pleasure bursts under his fingers like fireworks, and it takes all of Sherry’s self-control not to make a sound. She goes limp regardless, and hardly notices where they’re going as he tugs her through his chosen doorway. Then he’s gone, gun out and footsteps light as he patrols through the small store in search of any hidden dangers.

Okay, Sherry thinks to herself, okay. What are the facts?

The facts are that she was exposed to the C-virus by something that Leon said turned people immediately after infection. The facts are that it did not do that to her, and they decided that somehow, some way, that meant she would be okay. The facts are that now, long after the virus should have turned her into a mindless bioweapon, she’s suddenly feeling…something.

That something being, instead of murderous instinct, incredible sexual arousal.

Okay. Cool. That’s cool. That’s totally fine. Actually…yeah, it _is_ okay, she doesn’t feel too bad. It will be- no, it is not fine! Not fine. At all. Nope. _Not_ fucking fine.

Then Leon is coming back around the corner, posture much easier and pistol pointing at the floor. And everything is definitely, absolutely, not at all fine.

Sherry feels her mouth dry up as she looks at him, really looks at him. Of course she knows Leon is attractive – he’d been her first real crush, obviously, the gorgeous young police officer who had risked his life to protect her when the world went to hell. A decade and a half had done nothing to dull his striking good looks, and she can tell by the way he holds himself that he knows it. But now, the terrifying adrenaline of survival smothered by the fog in her brain, she can see him from an angle that isn’t just Leon the fighter, Leon the protector, Leon the guardian angel.

And she _wants_.

She wants to be close enough to smell what _Leon_ smells like underneath all the dirt and blood and soot, wants to run her fingers over the scars pinching his skin and the muscles she can see flexing through the thin blue material of his dress shirt. She wants him to hold her, wants to feel the calluses on his fingers against her eternally unblemished skin. Cupping her face, squeezing her thighs, tangling in her hair. Another part of her throbs in time with the heat in her limbs, and she wants him there too, she wants him _there_ most of all.

She can hardly think, she can hardly breathe, her hands shake where they’re clenched around her knees as she curls like a child against the wall.

Leon crouches down next to her, hand outstretched to touch her shoulder, but she shies away with a strangled noise and it drops back to his side.

“Sherry, what’s going on? Talk to me.” And oh _god_ his voice is low and gentle and just the right amount of raspy to make her squirm.

Sherry drops her head to her knees and tries to ignore him long enough to string thoughts together into a coherent sentence.

“This…sucks.” She chokes, and supposes it’s something.

“What does?” Leon continues, and to his credit, he’s trying to sound patient. Not his strong suit. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

She cannot say this out loud. She cannot tell _Leon_ , of all people, Leon who hasn’t seen her since she was _twelve_ , that she’d gotten infected with the desire to ride his cock until her heart gave out. If she flung herself off a building right now, could she blame it on the stress of the situation and not complete and utter mortification?

“Sherry, _talk to me_.” Leon sounds uneasy and Sherry knows his thoughts are beginning to go down the same road of blood that hers had.

Leon did not survive as long as he had by taking too many chances, and oh goddammit, she doesn’t want to die.

“The…the _thing_ ,” she gasps, and she thinks she _can_ smell him, something dark and spicy underneath the stench of death, “the _thing_ , the _gas_ , I think it…“

She feels Leon freeze up beside her, hears the soft tap of his finger against the metal of his gun. She has to talk, and she has to talk fast.

“It’s not…normal. I don’t want to…I don’t want to…” She loses her train of thought again. There are lots of things she _wants to_ do. “…hurt you, it’s not like that. But it did something.”

Leon relaxes a little, scoots around Sherry’s fetal position until she can hear his voice coming from right in front of her.

“You’re not…turning?” And there’s that relief again. She feels guilty for scaring him. Not that he shouldn’t still be scared – she is. This is an unknown variable if there ever was one.

But she knows he’s in no immediate physical danger, so she says, “I don’t think so.”.

“Okay.” Leon says, trying to sound easy, trying to sound calm, and every time he speaks she squeezes her thighs closer together. “Okay. So what is it doing to you? Do you feel sick?”

“Kind of.” Sherry mumbles, fingernails digging into her knees so hard she thinks she might be drawing blood. She doesn’t know. The only wetness she can feel is between her thighs.

Then Leon’s hand is over top of one of hers again, the one he already touched, the one that’s already so sensitive. And this time, she can’t hold back the noise, a startled gasp that makes Leon freeze in place as her head snaps up to meet his eyes. He withdraws his hand quickly, blue eyes wide as he apologizes anxiously, but all Sherry can look at are his lips.

“Shit! Did I hurt you?” They’re full and pink and they look incredibly, incredibly soft. She wonders what his stubble would feel like between her legs.

“Can I check for fever?” He’s already reaching towards her face, “Maybe your antibodies are forcing the virus out and it’s causing an inflammatory response.”

“No!” She shrieks, batting his hand away. That contact, as short as it is, makes her eyelids flutter.

She has to tell him. They have to figure this out, together, because she can’t go on like this and if he looks at her like that for another _second_ -

“Don’t touch me…please.” She wheezes, fist clenching in the fabric at her chest so hard she’s afraid she’ll tear it open. She wants him to do that. “It’s too much.”

“Too much?” Leon asks, grasping at this one piece of information she’s given him, “Does it hurt?”

“No!” She exclaims, screwing her eyes shut, and it’s taking everything in her power not to rub herself against the inside of her jeans. “It’s…oh my god. Oh my god, I want to die. I will actually kill myself if I have to say this to you.”

When she opens them again, Leon is looking absolutely bewildered. He seems to have grasped that she’s embarrassed about something, but can’t seem to fathom why. Sherry doesn’t blame him – there isn’t exactly a precedent for this kind of thing.

“Sherry,” Leon says, faux-patience in his voice again, “We’re in the field. You’re hurt…or something. You can’t afford to be self-conscious about it.”

He hesitates for a moment.

“Is it like…in a weird place?” He waves his arm vaguely as though he were going to gesture towards a certain part of Sherry but decided better of it at the last minute.

Sherry’s hips jerk in her pants, as though trying to close the gap between Leon’s hand and the place she desperately wanted it to go. The friction drags over her clit, sending sparks dancing up her spine, and she makes a soft noise that she almost, _almost_ managed to keep inside.

And Leon, bless his heart, despite the fact that he is undoubtedly more experienced in this arena than she, doesn’t realize what it is. To be fair, this is probably the last reaction he’s expecting from an injured comrade in the middle of a war zone, but she still thinks what happens next is mostly his fault.

“Okay.” He sighs, obviously feeling just as weird about this whole situation as she would be were she not consumed by thoughts about the noises he might make when she swallowed around his cock, “I know this is awkward for you, but if you’re hurt and you need help I need to take a look.”

Then he places his hand on the inside of Sherry’s thigh, right above the knee, and gently tugs her legs apart.

Sherry doesn’t even think. There’s molten lava spreading through her veins where he touched her, pouring down between her thighs, and she grabs him around the neck and yanks him to her mouth.

Leon makes a shocked little “mmph!” sound as she presses their lips soundly together, hardly wasting a moment before she deepens the kiss to an entirely socially unacceptable degree. She’s barely touched his teeth with her tongue, nothing in her head or her body except _moremoremoremore_ , when he shoves her away.

“Sherry, what the hell?” He splutters, lips spit-slick as they part in shock.

Sherry tries to snap back into herself, to recall the grounding shame from earlier, but she can’t. She tasted him, she had him and she tasted him and his lips _were_ as soft as they looked and she _needs_ to see the face he’ll make when he comes inside her.

“Leoonnnn…” And it’s a moan now, an unabashedly erotic moan that Leon has no choice but to recognize as such, “I need you, god I _need_ you.”

Leon’s mouth opens and closes a few times, his eyes darting from Sherry’s still-open legs to her face and back again as though his brain is short-circuiting while he searches for a response. “You…what?”

“The thing…the…the thing, I don’t….I don’t know what it did to me but…I…I can’t…” The words come out in a stuttering tangle, soft and breathy as Sherry gently rocks herself against the inside of her pants.

“Thing….” Leon mouths it for a few times before his brain seems to come back online, “The B.O.W.? The gas?”

Sherry makes an affirmative noise that comes out filthier than it has any right to.

“I felt…fine, afterwards…” She breathes, gaze raking over Leon’s body as though she could tear his clothes off with her eyes, “But…warm. And warmer and warmer and now I just…I can’t…think…”

She reaches for him again, disappointed when he leans out of her grasp.

“So what, it-“ He waves his hands helplessly, “-pumped you up with a- oh _dammit_.”

Leon slaps a hand to his forehead, and even that makes Sherry think of him hitting her…other places. She _needs_ him, god, can’t he see that and come _over_ here?

“A fucking _breeder_. Goddammit. Fuck.” He mumbles, and one of those words strikes a chord within Sherry that she can’t find the location of now.

“Leon _please_ , god _please_ …” She’s babbling, senseless, nearly incoherent, one of her hands pressing down between her legs without her conscious thought.

Leon’s eyes follow its motion, and when it presses down on her clit and she squeals heedlessly, he swallows hard. Sherry may not know much else right now, but she knows that Leon is a smart man and his body recognizes when it sees a woman who wants to please him.

There are reasons she shouldn’t want to do this, she knows. She can’t remember them.

He can, so she just has to break him down.

With a titanic effort, she breaks contact with her clit and pushes herself up on hands and knees, crawling closer to Leon as he sits frozen a few feet away.

“We don’t have time to waste.” The words come out on their own, in a purr with no conscious thought behind them, and she wonders just how smart this virus is, “We can’t just…wait for it to go away. I’m useless when all I’m thinking about is you.”

Leon seemingly chooses to ignore that last sentence. “Who says _that_ will make it go away either?”

It’s a little cute how he’s suddenly too flustered to even say the word. Sherry hums in a way that makes Leon’s ears go satisfyingly red. She knows he wouldn’t respond to someone else like this. Only her. He’s blushing for reasons other than love or lust, but. Only her.

And there’s something dark in his eyes that tells her lust isn't too far off.

“I just know.” She reaches a hand out, touches his side and immediately feels a little calmer.

“Sherry, you don’t know what you’re doing.” He protests, but doesn’t move.

“Mmm, I’ll deal with that later.” She breathes, and she knows it isn’t what he wants to hear but it’s turning him on anyways.

“Sherry, I have known you since…” She’s kissing his neck now, and he trails off, seeming to lose his train of thought, “…since you were a kid. I can’t, I can’t…touch you like-“ He breaks off when she bites down on the side of his neck, and he sucks in a breath that goes straight to her sex.

“You’re Sherry Birkin, you’re not thinking straight-“ Another gasp, she’s on the other side now, “I’m so much older than you.”

She pulls back, smirks despite herself. “I’m twenty-seven.” Then her lips are next to his ear. “ _And you want me_.”

Her teeth scrape across it teasingly and he really does moan. Small and stifled, but it’s there and it’s _hers_ and she feels victorious.

“We’ll deal with the rest of it later.” She breathes, “You’ve always been gorgeous, anyways.”

He stares at her, cheeks flushed and eyes hazy and she glances downwards to see that she was absolutely right about being wanted.

“…What do you want?” He says softly, hesitantly, and she knows she’s won.

“You.” Sherry grasps him through his pants in hands that have never been so confident before, “Leon, _you_. _Please_.”

She’s wrecked, nearly shaking, can’t wait any longer when one of Leon’s arms wraps gently around her waist and gives her permission.

Sherry throws herself into his lap, pressing herself down on him with a firmness that has them gasping into one another’s mouths. Her fingers tangle in his hair, darker than she remembers it but still sleek and beautiful even caked in the filth of the battlefield. He likes that, too, making another of those little choked-off noises as her fingernails scratch against his scalp.

Good, because nothing inside of her will let her be gentle right now.

She’s glad, for once, that Leon is the kind of person who does nothing halfway. He appears to have decided that if he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it with no regrets, as he grabs her hips to hold her down and grinds his hardness up into her. Her head tips back as she moans, and he wastes no time in attacking her exposed throat. She can do nothing but wrap her arms around his shoulders as he kisses her senseless, and she realizes that even underneath her, Leon has power over her that no one else does.

Then he pulls back, as suddenly as he started, and grabs the back of her thighs.

“Not here.” He murmurs against her neck as he stands, carrying her effortlessly over to the tempered glass of the store’s wide display counter.

Jewelry, she notes absentmindedly. Worthless now.

Leon sits Sherry down on the edge and slides between her spread legs to kiss her again. He tastes good, like Leon, like a little bit of blood and gunpowder. Her clumsy fingers yank at his holsters, at his vest, too eager to make much progress, and he lets go of her for a minute before they hit the floor. Her hand stretches out for his shirt, ready to tear away the barrier keeping her from feeling those shocks of skin-on-skin pleasure all over her body, but he knocks her hand away with a laugh.

“No way, Sherry. I happen to quite like this shirt, thanks.”

He’s right, but that doesn’t mean she has to like it. And it _really_ doesn’t mean she has to like it when he starts unbuttoning it as slowly as possible, studiously not meeting her eyes as he feigns innocence.

And maybe she’d have time for his teasing, in any other situation. Maybe she will, sometime later. But right now, she’s so wet she can feel it smearing across her thighs and her blood is singing and her head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton. So she touches herself again, desperate, arching her back and gasping as her eyelashes flutter.

It takes Leon all of five seconds to shuck the shirt after that.

He’s just as beautiful as Sherry had anticipated. He’s always been slim-built, body as lithe and catlike as his movements, his torso dipping and rising with muscle and scar tissue. She wants to put her mouth on it, and so she does.

She dips her head to his skin, feeling superheated on her lips from the virus coursing through her veins. She leaves wet kisses across his pectorals, traces her tongue along a story of scars and nips at one of his nipples. He holds onto her tightly through all of this, one hand gripping her upper arm and the other on the nape of her neck, sighing softly every so often until she’s got him all mapped out.

“God, you’re so… _god_.” Sherry whispers against his collarbone.

“Am I now?” Leon asks into her hair, and she can tell he’s smirking.

She grabs his hips and yanks them against her own, and that wipes the grin off his face.

Leon bites at her tongue in retaliation as his fingers slip down to the buttons of her shirt, and she squeaks into his mouth. He undoes each fastening with practiced ease, ignoring Sherry’s desperate attempts to just rip the damn thing off as she ruts their hips together. Leon’s taking control, is taking care of her, but she can feel how she affects him in the way he breathes quick and shallow against her mouth.

Her shirt is gone, and he can’t stop her from probably snapping the clasp on her sports bra as she yanks it off without undoing it. He doesn’t complain, however, and his hands are on her small breasts in an instant, thumbing the nipples in a movement that makes her keen.

Leon kisses down her neck and chest in a series of licks and bites until he’s got his mouth firmly around one of her nipples. He flicks it with his tongue and Sherry arches into him, breath heavy as she feels his hands slide down her bare torso to pop the button of her jeans. She jerks wantonly into his hand, searching for contact that’s so close she can nearly taste it, and his teeth graze her breast teasingly as he chuckles.

“Let me suck your cock.” Sherry breathes, and she feels Leon freeze for just a second before he pulls back with a wet _pop_.

His eyes search her face for a second and then he nods, says “Okay.” in a voice about as steady as her own.

Sherry slides off the countertop, unable to suppress a shiver as the movement rubs her against the inside of her pants. She wants him in her, wants to feel him so deep it hurts, wants him to pour his own heat into her fevered body, but she wants to do this first.

She drops to her knees, unabashedly eager, and yanks his belt and then his pants open with force. She can see how hard he is, straining against the fabric that binds him, and it’s all for her. Sherry tugs his pants down, then his underwear, just enough to access him – they’ll have time for the rest later. Leon’s cock springs upward, hard and pink and nestled in dark blonde curls, and Sherry barely has a moment to be a bit impressed by the size before she takes him in her hand and then her mouth.

She sucks him gently, tentatively at first, testing the waters. He’s heavy and salty on her tongue, and her mouth feels full in a way that soothes the burning inside her enough to make her sigh in relief. Sherry feels the corner of her mouth quirk around its load as Leon’s hand finds her hair in response. She’d never had much experience with this kind of thing, obviously – spending most of your life in government custody tends to do that. So of course, one of the first things she did when she finally tasted freedom was to go and seek out everything that she’d been missing.

She’d never had much experience, but a few pretty agent partners had taught her that there was something she was really good at.

Satisfied that she knows her way around the thing she’d been so desperately trying to get her hands on, Sherry leans back, licks her lips, and slides her mouth all the way down to the base.

This yanks the loudest noise she’s heard yet from Leon’s lips, a loud “ _holy_ -“ as his hips jerk involuntarily, slamming his cock down her throat. Sherry can’t pretend this is comfortable, but the feeling of Leon thrusting himself into her makes her clench down around nothing in her soaking panties.

“Sorry, sorry,” Leon mutters sheepishly, pulling himself out of her mouth a little.

Sherry doesn’t let him, instead taking him all the way back down and swallowing. Leon makes another broken sound, wordless this time, and Sherry slides off his length with the sound of wet lips. She looks up at him from under her fringe, and smiles in a way that might be coy.

“You like that?”

Leon stares down at her incredulously for a long moment, tousled hair caught on the corner of his parted lips, before he groans “ _fuck_ ” and pushes her head back towards his cock.

Sherry goes to work properly this time, no thought to decorum as she slides up and down Leon’s length, ensuring he can hear every single obscene sound she makes. It takes everything in her to keep her hands on Leon and off of herself as she rides empty air desperately below him. Then Leon’s hands are tugging at her hair, pulling her off with a tingle that went straight to her groin.

“I’m gonna cum in your mouth if you keep that up.” He breathes, silently asking her the question.

Sherry shakes her head and stands on shaky legs. Her hands grasp his hips as she leans up to kiss his jaw, then gasps “I need you to cum inside me.” into the stubble.

“Sherry…” Leon sounds hesitant again, second-guessing, and that just won’t do when Sherry’s as close as she is.

She nips along his jawline, sucking desperately in a way they both know is going to leave a mark, but that doesn’t matter because it makes him hiss and rut against her bare stomach.

“Do you have a condom? Or… _shit_ …or birth control at least?” He finishes anyways.

Sherry’s fingers dig into the muscle of his obliques and she almost hesitates, almost, but the bad memories aren’t quite strong enough anymore and Leon Kennedy’s rock-hard cock is currently smearing precum over her hip.

“I’m sterile.” She murmurs, plowing forward before he can answer, “And I’m clean. Got tested recently.” She can’t help the sardonic grin that follows that one.

Leon seems like he wants to say something else, but then she bites down on that purple spot on his neck that he loves so much and he curses and begins tugging at the waistband of her pants and Sherry almost cums right there.

They break apart for Sherry to deal with her boot situation, and as she rips them off and lets her capris follow she sees Leon doing the same. He’s faster, and he stops her at her panties with a grip of her wrist, instead lifting her up onto the counter like before. He wrenches her legs apart, seeming to realize that that kind of treatment is what she needs right now, and dives between her thighs before she has a chance to admire him without his clothes.

And _ohgodfuckshitJesusChrist_ , she was right about the stubble.

He kisses her all over, nipping and nuzzling from her knee up to her soaked panties, the chill from which is nicely offset by the warmth of his breath through the fabric. His tongue darts out, drags slowly up the length of her slit through soft white cotton. Then he reaches out, pulls it aside with one finger, and she presses her hips up into his face with a keen.

His stubble scratching across her wetness feels like a thousand tiny sparklers, and as his tongue dips inside her Sherry knows she has to stop him or she’ll ride his face to orgasm right then and there. She lets herself indulge in a few more licks and then tugs him backwards, knowing she looks a wreck even as he smirks at it with her slick smeared all over his mouth.

“Leon,” She chokes, and she’s _gone_ , she’s _gone_ , Sherry Birkin can’t answer the phone right now, she’s busy getting pounded into next week, “Leon.”

He’s grinning slyly, breathless but sexy and he knows it, and there’s still something soft in his eyes when he looks at her. “What is it, Sherry? Use your words.”

“ _Leon_ ,” her fingers tangle in his hair and he’s watching her with those blue, blue eyes that always looked at her as though she were some kind of treasure, something to keep safe, “Fuck me, Leon.”

Even as Sherry looks into them they darken, the softness replaced by something else, something just as thrilling.

“God, Sherry.” He breathes, and she’s lifting her legs up so he can pull her soaked panties off properly.

Sherry spreads her legs for him without even being touched, leaning back on her elbows and arching towards him in a desperate show of willingness. He stops moving for just a moment, a look on his face that she can’t read and really doesn’t care to at this point, before he’s taking hold of her thighs and pulling her closer.

“Do you need-“ He starts, but she’s already interrupting him with an emphatic shake of her head.

“No,” She pushes his ready fingers away, “I need _you_ , I just need _you_ , now, right now.”

“Are you su-“

“ _Yes_.”

So he moves his hips forward, weeping head nudging gently against her velvet heat, and she nearly grabs him and impales herself right there. But he wants to start out slow, she can tell, and this is it, this is what she’s felt like she couldn’t live without for what’s probably been two hours but feels more like a lifetime, and _fuck fuck fuck_ she’s not usually like this but _Leon Kennedy’s cock is inside her_.

When he’s halfway in she can’t take it any longer, and, wrapping her legs around his toned waist, yanks him the rest of the way in. If she was a different person right now, if she was a different _Sherry_ right now, maybe this would hurt. But she’s so wet and she needs _so much_ that the feeling of stretching, of being filled with no preemption, is absolute ecstasy.

Sherry’s nails dig into Leon’s shoulders where he’s bent over her motionlessly, still worried he’ll injure her, before Sherry chokes out, “Kennedy, didn’t I tell you to _fuck me_?”

So he pulls out, grips her thighs with what she hopes is bruising force, and drives himself inside her just like she needs. Like they both need, now, with Sherry’s nails raking down Leon’s back and little purple marks blooming around one of Sherry’s nipples. She doesn’t hold back, can’t hold back, her whole body thrumming with the heat and the fireworks, her insides feeling like a thousand hummingbirds have hollowed her out and made a nest.

Leon fucks her _good_ , not that she expected any less. It must be hard to tell, because every thrust draws moans from her throat, but he finds her sweet spot quickly and nails it brutally every time. Her spine curves as he bites into the junction of her neck and shoulder, hard, maybe hard enough to draw blood. It feels like a kiss, especially when he moans into it just like that right after.

She can feel his every movement inside her, hotter even than the burn of the infection but the opposite of painful, can feel him filling her over and over and over again as he muffles his sounds in the hills and valleys of her breasts and she pulls on his hair just the way he likes.

He fucks her and she _adores_ him, adores him the way she always has and in a new way she never thought she would.

Leon’s breath is hot against her neck, his stubble sparking against her skin like the Fourth of July, when she feels it coming, sees the crest of the wave. But she wants to feel something else first, wants to feel the heat just from him that no virus could ever compare to, so she clenches down around him mercilessly and his grip on her hips tightens as he lets out a wordless cry that almost sounds like her name.

And then there’s molten gold deep inside her and the wave breaks. Her back bends like a bow, nails so deep in Leon’s skin that she knows she’s drawing blood, and the world goes dark as she cries out Leon’s name.

 

* * *

 

When Sherry wakes, she’s still warm.

It’s a different warm, though, a softer warm. No raging wildfire of need scorching her insides, no white-hot desire lodged deep in her gut.

She’s just…warm. Safe.

She opens her eyes slowly, thinking she really needs to stop checking out in the middle of a war zone, and it’s only the permeating feeling of comfort that keeps her from jumping to her feet with gun in hand at the sight of an unfamiliar room.

It’s a bedroom, that much is certain. She’s on a bed. In a room. With a ceiling that looks about as steady as she feels.

Then she rolls her head to the side, slowly, still cautious, vaguely aware that her hair is damp, and sees Leon sitting on the chair by the desk at the same time as he sees her, and. Well.

She shoots upright, completely disoriented. She remembers everything just fine, alright – remembers _breeding initiator_ and need so strong it burned away at Sherry Birkin until all that was left was desire and the thought of blue eyes. She remembers lips and teeth and tongue and nails.

Leon is watching her silently, expression inscrutable.

“Where-“ her voice is hoarse, her throat throbs, and she feels her cheeks grow hot as she remembers why. “Where are we?”

“An apartment…on top of the store. I uh…” At this Leon looks away, scratching his head awkwardly, and she realizes that his hair is wet as well. “I couldn’t wake you up, so I cleaned you off real quick and…re-dressed you.”

Sherry swallows hard.

“How long-“ She breaks off into a little cough, as if this wasn’t embarrassing enough.

At least Leon seemed to feel as uncomfortable as she did. “Not long. About half an hour. I managed to knock the communicator back together, kind of. Helena and Jake just reached the rendezvous. Hunnigan says she can get us there in fifteen – as soon as you’re ready.”

Sherry nods stiffly and goes to stand when her knees buckle underneath her and she nearly hits the ground. Leon’s there though, as he always is, warm and supportive beside her, except now all she can think about is the sound he makes when he cums. She groans, hopelessly, dropping her head to his shoulder in absolute mortification.

“I am actually going to kill myself.” She mumbles, and feels Leon’s chest shake with a chuckle.

“Was it that bad?”

She groans again, louder this time, before pulling back and staring him straight in the eyes. “I’m so sorry, Leon.”

He shakes his head, that beautiful hair a little darker with wetness as it flops over his eye. “Don’t even start that, Sherry-“

Well, this was supposed to be a strong, put-together apology, but Sherry starts babbling as she always does. “-if I made you uncomfortable, I’m so sorry. I was out of line and I was pressuring you and that is _so_ not okay, oh my god. Oh my god. I was like, begging you and I couldn’t even take no for an answer and no matter how I feel about you I should _never_ have let it get that far and-“

“Sherry!” Leon has her by the shoulders, and he cuts her off with one hard look. “Stop it. You weren’t in your right mind. You said yourself you couldn’t think straight, so if anyone should be apologizing, it’s me. I- wait, how you feel about me?”

Smart suave secret agent Leon Kennedy looks so absolutely baffled by the realization that Sherry almost giggles before she realizes what he’d just said and slaps a hand over her mouth.

One thing about B.O.W. breeder Sherry – she couldn’t blush nearly as red as sober Sherry could.

“I…” Sherry splutters, at a loss for words, “I just…I mean…” She throws her hands up in defeat. “You saved my _life_ back in Raccoon City, Leon! I’ve spent over a decade locked up in government facilities without many happy memories to look back on, and you were _there_ , and you make me feel so _safe_ and _warm_ , and you _know_ how attractive you are, and just…look, I’m not saying I’m in _love_ with you or anything, I’m just saying that…if it was someone else, maybe I wouldn’t have reacted so…strongly.”

She fades out by the end, reaching a new tier of humiliation as she realizes it’s probably true. If she had ended up in this situation with Jake, would she have…? Probably. But Sherry is doubtful the effect would have been quite so extreme.

Leon is just staring at her, mouth open in bewilderment. Then it drops into a little smile and he looks at her with those eyes again, softer than they ever were before.

“Sherry.” He says gently, looking calmer than she’s seen him since…well, ever, “I…when we…I didn’t have the excuse of a drug. You know that.”

Sherry remains silent. She does know that, but she also knows that Leon’s known her since she was _twelve_ and anyone could see that fucking the infection out of her was a better idea than dying.

He sighs, eyes darting out the window towards the dark and empty streets, and Sherry knows they don’t really have time to talk about it right now. But Leon talks anyway.

“I barely recognized you when I first saw you, you know that? You really, uh…grew up.” Leon gives her that sly smirk, more comfortable than it was before, and Sherry feels herself turn firetruck red. “I’m not gonna say I was really thinking of much before _that_ happened, what with the whole monster thing, but…I had sex with you because I wanted to, Sherry.” He shrugs one shoulder, still looking a little sheepish about the whole thing. “That’s all.”

Sherry nods. “Okay,” she says, feeling lighter somehow, “Okay.”

Leon picks up his guns in silence, strapping the holsters over his chest as Sherry finds her footing amidst the throb of fullness between her legs. It’s rather inconvenient, she thinks, definitely not the best time for a quickie, but she likes the feeling.

She looks back at Leon, and he smiles much like a rookie cop trying to tread water far out of his depth. That smile emboldens her, and she finds herself opening her mouth even as she nonchalantly pops her pistol out of its holster.

“You know, we can talk about this later, of course…” She flicks off the safety. “…but I wouldn’t mind doing it again sometime.”

Leon seems to choke on his next inhale for a moment before he coughs it back up and gives her his trademark reckless Leon Kennedy grin.

“We can talk about it. Ready to save the world?”

**Author's Note:**

> whenever I read Sherry's "fuck me Leon" it's in Ashley's voice


End file.
